Unexpected Magic Read Free

attitudes, and the only one not quite right for the picture was Ursula with her chalk white skin and wild black hair. The others all had smooth fair heads, ranging from near white in the young ones, through straw yellow, to honey in the older ones. My own hair had gone beyond the honey, since I was so much older, into dull brown.
    Here I noticed how big I was again. My torso was thick, more like an oil drum than a tube, and my legs looked fat beside their skinny little limbs. I began to feel sinful again. I had to force myself to attend to the islands I was making. I gave them landscapes and invented people for them.
    â€œWhat you doing?” asked Ellen.
    â€œMaking islands.” I was feeling back-to-nature and at ease again.
    â€œStupid,” she said.
    More or less as she spoke, a tractor came up the lane behind her, going toward the village. The man driving it stopped it just in front of the water and stared. He had one of those oval narrow faces that always went with people who went to Chapel in the village. I know I thought he was Chapel. He was the sort of age you might expect someone to be who was a father of small children. He looked as if he had children. And he was deeply and utterly shocked. He looked at the brawling, naked little ones, he looked at Ellen, and he looked at me. Then he leaned down and said, quite mildly, “You didn’t ought to do that.”
    â€œTheir clothes were getting wet, you see,” I said.
    He just gave me another, mild, shocked look and started the tractor and went through the river, making it all muddy. I never, ever saw him again.
    â€œTold you so,” said Ellen.
    That was the end of the adventure. I felt deeply sinful. The little ones were suddenly not having fun any more. Without making much fuss about it, we all quietly got our clothes and got dressed again. We retraced our steps to the village. It was just about lunchtime anyway.
    As I said, word gets round in a village with amazing speed. “You know the girl Jones? She took thirty kids down Water Lane and encouraged them to do wrong there. They was all there, naked as the day they was born, sitting in the river there, and her along with them, as bold as brass. A big girl like the girl Jones did ought to know better! Whatever next!”
    My parents interrogated me about it the next day. Isobel was there, backward hovering, wanting to check that her instinct had been right, I think, and fearful of the outcome. She looked relieved when the questions were mild and puzzled. I think my mother did not believe I had done anything so bizarre.
    â€œThere is nothing shameful about the naked human body,” I reiterated.
    Since my mother had given me the book that said so, there was very little she could reply. She turned to Ursula. But Ursula was stoically and fiercely loyal. She said nothing at all.
    The only result of this adventure was that nobody ever suggested I should look after any children except my own sisters (who were strange anyway). Jean kept her promise to be my friend. The next year, when the Americans came to England, Jean and I spent many happy hours sitting on the church wall watching young GIs stagger out of the pub to be sick. But Jean never brought her sisters with her. I think her mother had forbidden it.
    When I look back, I rather admire my nine-year-old self. I had been handed the baby several times over that morning. I took the most harmless possible way to disqualify myself as a child-minder. Nobody got hurt. Everyone had fun. And I never had to do it again.

Nad and Dan adn Quaffy
    S he had struggled rather as a writer until she got her word processor. Or not exactly struggled , she thought, frowning at her screen and flipping the cursor back to correct adn to and. For some reason, she always garbled the word and. It was always adn or nad; dna or nda were less frequent, but all of them appeared far oftener than the right way. She had only started to make this mistake after she